Life Outside PLT1

A REALLY OLD, short rant about working as tech support.

The timestamp on the file housing this rant says “Saturday, 10 July 2004 9:54:09 p.m..”

A short rant which i’d meant to post on my own website, but never got around to. Anyway; here’s something retro:

A SLIGHTLY YOUNGER SICOPATH ONCE WROTE:
As a SwiftDirect “technican”(sic), I find alot of enjoyment in tinkering with other people’s computer hardware, hardware I probably can’t afford for myself. It is a delightful job for hardware addicts like myself who share the opinions “silicon is a suitable replacement for any social life” and “the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed be the man who sheperds the weak through the valley of darkness for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down with furious anger those who would try to poison and destroy my brothers! AND YOU WILL KNOW MY NAME IS THE LORD WHEN I LAY MY VENGEANCE UPON THEE!”

But at times I am disheartened by situations. Situations such as people who run computers about 50 times faster than mine, yet get 500 times as much faults.

Let me detail the various things which have happened in the most recent repair/troubleshoot I had the pleasure of partaking in, let me list… No wait, fuck that. I’m going to start from the beginning…

It was a fine and dandy morning here in the dimly lit sanctum in which I spend my days avoiding sunburn and counterracting the positive effect of excercise. Out of nowhere, I receive an IM from Ben “I’ll do it on Tuesday” Holliss, “when did you want to get sourabhs bits and pieces?” to which I answer; “BITCH! GET TO THE BAR RIGHT NOW AND BUY ME A TEQUILA!” (We here at SwiftDirect have special code-phrases; this one meaning “Sourabh has the money already, so it would be best if we can order as soon as possible”) Ben then replies “ok, shall i order and pick up the parts today, then you can come by and help sourabh install them?” I then retort; “ASS POOP DONKEY FLYING MACHINE! TAKE THAT YOU STUPID ARAB SCHOOLGIRL, HOW’S THAT JELLO FOR YA?” (This phrase meaning “Yeah, whatever’s good. TXT me when you leave and i’ll meet you at [supplier]).
So after a small ordeal, I have the parts and are now beating down the highway with Portishead playing on the CD player(I was feeling moody). After running down a few cancer patients who were playing hopscotch in the middle of the road, I am now at Sourabh’s fortress of solitude. Sourabh informs me Ben called and would like me to reciprocate, god damn it. What does Ben have to say? “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to spend one mindfuck of a night performing what experts like to refer to as ‘data recovery’ and ‘hard drive troubleshooting’” well, what else could I say to that except; “CHOKE A FISH, SAILOR!” (This means “can’t someone else do it?”) his answer was “no”.

Let me just go over the finer details of this computer I would be working on:
- AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (2.0ghz 512kb L2 Cache)
- MSI K8T Neo Motherboard
- 512MB DDR400 RAM (Hynix CT-D43)
- 8+/8- DVD rewriter, 16x DVD ROM
- MSI Radeon 9800 pro
- Thermaltake Venus 12 K8 cooler
- 2 * 80GB Serial ATA Hard Drives

Let’s compare this computer here with my own:
- AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (core slightly chipped, running 2.19ghz, 512kb L2 Cache)
- Soltek SL-75FRN2L Motherboard (Ghetto style NB modding bling bling yo, you suckas got served.)
- 1024MB DDR400 RAM (Samsung TCCC; Sean stole my Hynix BT-D43’s, bastard.)
- 52/32/52/16 Combo drive, 52x CD-ROM drive.
- Gigabyte Radeon 9600XT (does 567/700, it’s blue, that’s about it.)
- Thermaltake Volcano 12 cooler (sometimes I worry about it falling off, taking out a few expensive parts on it’s way down)
- 1 * 40GB ATA-100 Hard Drive

Okay, now if you knew anything about computer architecture you would have established that my own computer is a kid on a tricycle compared to this TANK.

So yes, I take this monster-behemoth-Skeletor defeating-HE MAN home, throw it down alongside a few bottles of ginger beer, coke and a hot dog. I open it up and find A JUNGLE OF WIRES!

After a few hours of data recovery, I had found several things;
- Windows XP file protection
- Illegal ROMS(Gameboy Advance, Neo Geo)
- Many many MP3’s (Terrible ones)
- Viruses
- A few million Anime pictures
- An automated program to clear out history, internet cache, cookies, recycle bin and filelists (This guy obviously <3’s teh pr0n).

Such an awesome machine, being polluted with all the filth of the internet.
I crawled into the corner, placed my head in my hands and began twitching uncontrollably… I continue twitching to this day…

Note: Yes, i’ve upgraded my computer since then.